[pmwiki-users] Burnt! Simultaneous edit lost :-(

[Joachim Durchholz]

Patrick R. Michaud schrieb:
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 10:07:49PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>>> I kinda like this last idea.  It might even be worthwhile to
>>> display the page history even when the merge does succeed,
>>> since otherwise it's not at all obvious what changed if there
>>> weren't any conflicts.
>> [...]
>> Of course, this doesn't work if there's no diff available. 
> 
> There almost *has* to be a diff available,  unless an admin
> is turning off the page history entirely, in which case I think
> the admin has bigger issues than this one.  :-)  Short of that,
> I can't imagine how we would possibly be arriving at this situation
> without a diff of some sort.

I meant: when there's no diff utility available.
Of course, if there's a PHP-based diff available, everything in this 
subthread is moot ;-)

>> Um... thinking a bit further: if a lazy user gets such a page, he'll 
>> probably hit the "save" button anyway, overwriting the other guy's 
>> changes. So it's time for some ergonomic trickery: Display the other 
>> guy's changes in the edit window, and the lazy guy's changes as source 
>> text below. This also punishes those who start editing a page and leave 
>> it open while away for lunch, which is what we want.
> 
> This puts the punishment in absolutely the wrong place (nor do I think
> it's consistent with PmWiki Philosophy #1 to be punishing any author :-).

If there are simultaneous edits, there will be some punishment for all 
but one of the simultaneous authors. It's just a question whom to punish...

> Consider: If I make a very long set of changes to a page, hit "Save", 
> and while I was doing my long writing someone else saved a minor
> edit such as fixing a typo, then under the above scenario I would
> basically have to re-apply all of my lengthy edits simply because
> someone else changed a single character while I was making them.  
> To me, that's backwards.

Sure. OTOH it would be too easy to simply save your own changes and 
overwrite those of the other people. Besides, if there's no good diff 
available, it's easier to spot your own changes than those of other 
people, let alone reapply them - IOW the temptation to clobber those 
other changes will be quite high.

Regards,
Jo